Course Description

LAW 755 - Workers' Rights Clinic

The Workers’ Rights Clinic is looking for motivated students with a strong interest in labor law and social justice. Under the supervision of in-house counsel and a senior organizing director,clinic students will participate in the legal program of UNITE HERE Local 11, a progressive, movement-oriented labor union, which represents hotel and food service workers throughout Southern California. In addition to serving as the collective bargaining representative for thousands of hotel and food service employees, many of them immigrants and women of color, the Union leads creative, militant, member-driven organizing campaigns, with the goal of building union density and workers' power in the hospitality industry. The Clinic will offers students the opportunity to gain a wide range of legal experience, including representing members in grievance and arbitration proceedings; investigating, filing and presenting unfair labor practice charges to the NLRB; researching and formulating legal strategy in support of organizing campaigns; protecting members' free speech rights at Union actions and picket lines; and helping to create new policy initiatives to assist workers to organize. In the classroom, students will read and discuss leading scholarship on labor and employment law, share and analyze their clinical work, and explore role of lawyers and legal advocacy in social justice movements.